Tek net, p.11
Tek Net, page 11
“Usually comes in at a certain time, does he?”
“Right, always at one-thirty p.m. Prompt.”
Nodding, Gomez asked her, “Any notion where he resides or—Ouch.”
“Oops, sorry.”
“Where does Sir Denis live?”
“Near here.”
“Bueno,” he said. “How about a few more details—street address and the like?”
“Far as I know, he—” The music stopped, Mitzi froze again.
Gomez whipped out the Banx card and thrust it into the slot.
“What say we sit this one out?” she suggested. “My dogs are aching.” The pretty blonde android took his hand and led him over to one of the small rickety tables in a shadowy corner.
“About Sir Denis’ present location?”
“Well, the last time I danced with him—and if you really want to get your tootsies stomped on, try waltzing with a fat man,” she said, elbows on the tabletop. “Anyway, the last time I talked with the guy, he told me he had rooms down at the Chesterton Hotel.”
“Gracias.” Gomez started to stand up.
A heavy hand grabbed his shoulder from behind and shoved him back down. “What’s the rush, Sherlock?”
23
Slightly hunched, hands in his trouser pockets, Marriner stood at a wide viewindow in his suite in the Movie Palace Casino Hotel. The number of wrinkles on his black forehead kept increasing as he gazed down at the main street of the simulated city that existed within the orbiting satellite. “Get Swanson,” he said without turning from the window.
Miles/26, his chrome chest glittering in the artificial sunlight that was coming in through the multiple windows, was reclining on a low ebony sofa. Feet up, metallic hands locked behind his chrome-plated skull. “Can’t do, boss.”
“Don’t tell me he’s dead, too?”
“Nope, Swanson did a flit.”
“Where to?”
“He’s now working on the New Hollywood satellite.”
Marriner said, “See that Swanson has an accident.”
“How serious?”
“Your choice, Miles.”
“Righto, boss.”
“So who’s responsible for the palm trees down there on Marriner Drive?”
“A lady named Rosebud Semovich.”
“Tell her the fronds aren’t green enough.”
“You got it.”
Marriner left the window. “Where the hell is Rodriguez?”
“Ascending in Elevator number five.”
“He’s late.”
“By three minutes and seventeen seconds, yes.”
Marriner’s hands fisted. “Rodriguez better handle our Tuesday meet with Anzelmo and his toadies better than he manages his time.”
“I wouldn’t, boss, allude to Anzelmo’s associates as toadies.”
“What you call them is your own damn business, but don’t—”
“They are all, each in his own way, important Teklords. Cream of the European crop,” reminded the mechanical man. “And, more to the point, they’re your business partners on the TekNet venture.”
Marriner laughed a very quick laugh. “For now,” he told the robot.
The pretty blonde android pressed her fingertips to the slot between her breasts. “Gee, Leo, what are you doing to my date?”
The big, wide man who’d come up behind Gomez told her, “Go away now, Mitzi.”
“He’s a nice guy, Leo, and a paying customer to—”
“Leave us.”
“No need to speak to the lady in such a tone,” said Gomez in a voice he hoped sounded timid. He was being held in his chair by the pressure Leo was exerting on his shoulder.
“Well, I guess,” said the mechanical blonde, getting up from the wobbly little table, “I’ll leave you boys. Nice meeting you, mister.”
Leo leaned closer. “What you didn’t know, Gomez,” he said, “is that we got all our andy dancers bugged.”
“I am merely trying, sir, to locate my old school chum, Sir Denis Rowley, who—”
“We also got a great monitoring system,” continued the dance hall manager. “When I spotted you whirling about the floor with Mitzi, I exclaimed, ‘Why, I do believe that’s that son of a bitch from the goddamned Cosmos Detective Agency.’”
“That is one of my aliases, sí.”
“We don’t like private dicks hanging around here,” Leo explained, bending closer. “Nor are we fond of snoops who’re interested in Sir Denis.”
Gomez suddenly went slack and slumped in his chair.
That caused Leo to go lurching forward, loosening his grip.
Straightening up, Gomez brought up both booted feet and kicked the underside of the little table.
The table left the floor, went looping upward and then smacked into Leo’s head.
Gomez had, meantime, thrown himself to the floor. He rolled twice to his right, executed a reverse somersault that brought him to his feet with his stungun in his hand. “Adios, cabrón,” he said to the manager as he squeezed the trigger.
The beam smacked Leo in the groin. He yowled, half turned, crouched, fell to one knee and passed out.
By the time the big, wide man had smacked the dance floor, Gomez was halfway to the exit.
“See you again sometime, maybe?” called Mitzi when he went diving out into the afternoon street.
Gomez holstered his gun and kept running for a good two blocks.
Austin Quadrill allowed himself to smile.
“Much better,” he murmured, crouching to pick the silver kitten up from his workshop floor.
The little clockwork animal began purring as he lifted it up close to his face. With one glittering metallic paw it poked at his chin as he inspected it.
“Jesus, that’s damn touching,” observed a disdainful voice behind him.
He spun around, set the clockwork kitten on a worktable. “Why are you here, Yedra?”
The crew-cut young woman laughed. “Aren’t you more interested in the how of it, Austin?”
“I assume somebody betrayed me. Gave you my location,” he said, scowling at her. “It won’t be difficult to find out who.”
“And I had to get by your security system too.” Yedra laughed again, moving nearer to him. “I told you I’d find you, asshole, and I did it.”
“Yes, you can’t seem to resist a challenge like that,” he commented. “A pity.”
She started to reach out to pat the clockwork kitten. “That’s damned cute. You ought—”
“I don’t want you here.” Quadrill caught her wrist before her fingertips reached the kitten. “I don’t want anybody here.”
She pulled free of him, backed off. “C’mon, pendejo, admit that you’re impressed by me,” she coaxed. “You also, maybe, ought to be a little bit scared, Austin. If you were to screw up on a job for me—hell, I’d come and find you no matter where you were holed up.”
Head slightly tilted to the left, he eyed her. “Where’s the meeting between Marriner and Anzelmo’s crew going to take place? That is what you came to tell me, isn’t it?”
Smiling, she nodded and ran the flat of her hand over her close-cropped dark hair. “You still want to work for me? You’re not offended that I invaded your privacy?”
“I’m working for Johnny Trocadero and you,” he corrected. “Soon as you put another third of my fee into my undercover account, I’ll get rolling.”
“It’s there already,” she assured him. “The place is so obvious, we should’ve guessed it.” She made an upward jabbing motion with her right thumb. “Up in the Movie Palace.”
“And it’s still Tuesday?”
“Tuesday, just after dinner—satellite time.”
“All right.” He turned his back on her, tapped the kitten’s shiny back with his forefinger. “I’ll take care of it.”
“You sure you can? There’s a hell of a lot of security to get through.”
Facing her, Quadrill said, “I’ll do it.”
“Keep in mind, Austin, that I got in here. Maybe you’re slipping and we need—”
“I was too complacent about my security,” he told her. “Your break-in was just the stimulus I needed.”
She ran her hand over her hair again. “Okay,” she said, slowly. “If anything changes, you’ll hear from me.”
“Not in person,” he said.
Yedra smiled at him. “I won’t scare you again,” she said.
He took her arm and guided her toward the doorway. “You’ve got one of those foolish skull-mail implants, don’t you?”
“Yes—and it isn’t foolish.”
Reaching out, he tapped the door and it slid aside. “Causes you a lot of headaches, doesn’t it?”
“No, nothing like that.” Yedra stepped out into the hallway. “I never feel any pain from it at all.”
The door shut on her and Quadrill returned to his worktable. “You will,” he promised quietly.
24
Gomez encountered him in an alley.
This particular alley, narrow and unkempt, ran along the backside of the three-story Hotel Chesterton.
The detective was approaching the rear entrance to the tumbledown neostucco building.
Sir Denis Rowley was a flabby man of middle years. His shaggy hair was a carroty orange, his puffy face of a greyish hue. Everything he owned at the moment, he was carrying in one modest-sized suitcase.
He came hurrying, puffing, out of the rear doorway of the Chesterton about ten seconds before Gomez reached it.
“Momentito, Sir Denis,” Gomez called.
The fat man was waddling off in the opposite direction. “In a frightful hurry, old man,” he said over his shoulder.
Sprinting, Gomez caught up with him, grabbed one flabby arm and halted his retreat. “I want to have a small little talk with you.”
“Afraid I don’t know you, old boy,” he said, trying to break away. “No time to chitchat with anyone actually.”
“You know me, Denny.” Gomez yanked him around so that they were facing each other. “I knew you even before your knighthood.”
Sir Denis’ eyes narrowed. “Jove, I do believe it’s Sidney Gomez,” he said. “Forgive me, Sidney, old fellow, but I’ve a most urgent appointment elsewhere.”
“No, actually you’re going to tell me where they took Jake.”
Sir Denis inquired, “Which Jake would this be?”
From his shoulder holster Gomez yanked his stungun. He jabbed it into the flabby man’s middle. “Explain to me who hired you to arrange their entry into the NecroPlex,” he suggested, “or you’ll suffer from numb cojones for the foreseeable future.”
“Sidney, you know my code of ethics won’t—”
“Who paid you?” he said. “And where is Jake Cardigan?”
The flabby man was perspiring. “English chaps, they were,” he said finally.
Gomez prodded with the gun barrel. “And?”
“These are powerful people, Sidney. Mean-minded too, and they aren’t awfully fond of a snitch.”
“Who?”
Sir Denis swallowed twice, glancing around the alley, uneasy. “They work for the Anzelmo cartel. The only name I know is that of the head chap—Edmond Yates.”
“Why did they go into that underground setup?”
“To fetch your wife—that is, your onetime wife,” the fat man told him.
“What were they supposed to do with her?”
“Don’t know, Sidney.” He shook his head vigorously.
“And what were their orders concerning Jake and me?”
Sir Denis glanced around again. “Beastly hot in this alley, don’t you think?”
“What were their orders?”
“This they didn’t confide in me,” he said. “However, old man, I heard—and this is only hearsay, mind you—they grabbed your partner down there. Took him to Doc Sears.”
Pulling back his gun hand, Gomez stepped backwards. “That old quack over in the Venice Sector?”
“Fancies himself a therapist,” answered the flabby man. “Specializes in mindwipes, brainscans and other shady practices. Used to be a Tek runner, I do believe.”
“Okay, Sir Denis,” said Gomez, starting to put his stungun away. “You can trot along and—”
“Bloody hell.” The fat man was looking up into the hot, hazy sky overhead. “It’s too damned late.”
“… Wise decision, Jake, to have yourself committed here. Don’t you?”
Jake suddenly became aware of himself again.
“Is something wrong, Jake?”
He was sitting in a comfortable chair on a sun-bright patio. Beyond the oval of simulated red brick stretched a broad slanting lawn. Then came woods, tall trees and deep shadows.
Far off, down near the edge of the forest, there were people. Five or six of them, small in the distance, blurred. Walking some of them, one sitting slumped in an electronic wheelchair.
“Jake?”
The woman was sitting a few feet away from him, in a less comfortable chair. She was thin, pale blonde, wearing a buff-colored skirtsuit. Jake had never seen her before.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Weatherford, I didn’t quite catch your question,” he said to her.
She smiled. “Nothing to be sorry about.” She was sitting very straight in the metal chair, hands folded in her lap. “I was simply complimenting you on your decision to come to The Institute—voluntarily—and begin to work on your problem.”
Far downhill one of the tiny figures left the group and went running toward the forest. He suddenly hit some invisible barrier, seemed to hang in the air for a few seconds before dropping to his knees on the bright green grass.
Jake nodded. “Yes, I realized, doctor, that it was time to do something. My obsession with the death of Beth Kittridge was interfering with my work.”
“With your entire life,” added the doctor.
“Exactly, yeah. And, I feel, in the time I’ve been here at The Institute I’ve started to make progress.” Jake couldn’t seem to remember exactly how long he’d actually been here. He wasn’t, he now realized, sure where here was.
Dr. Weatherford leaned forward, resting her hands on her knees. “I know you have very strong feelings about Tek,” she said. “Strongly negative attitudes.”
“Getting hooked on Tek screwed up my life.”
She nodded with sympathy. “I can understand that, Jake,” she said. “However, I think a technique we’ve developed here at The Institute might very well help you to distance yourself from Beth’s death.”
He frowned. “This new technique—it involves Tek?”
“It does,” replied the thin doctor. “You have my word, however, that we only use it in a well-controlled and completely safe manner.”
“I don’t,” he said, “know.”
“Dr. Allensky has had a great deal of success recently with Tek therapy.”
Jake couldn’t remember who Dr. Allensky was. “Well, if he says it works, I suppose it’s okay.”
“That’s the sort of positive attitude I’m pleased to see you adopting, Jake.”
“I came here to work on my problem,” he told the therapist. “I’ll go along with whatever you and Dr. Allensky suggest.”
Smiling, she rose from her chair. “That ends our session for this afternoon,” she informed him. “If we can arrange it, I’d very much like to have your first Tek therapy session this evening after the shift one dinner hour.”
“That would be fine.” He eased up out of his chair and turned away from the doctor.
This wing of The Institute was constructed chiefly of opaque plastiglass panels and silvery metal struts.
He said goodbye to Dr. Weatherford and went walking toward a door marked Patients’ Entrance 6.
Jake felt that he shouldn’t have any notion where his room was. But he did seem to know.
He crossed over to Ramp 3, let it carry him up to Level 5. His room was #5R, and as soon as it scanned his hand print, it let him in.
He crossed the threshold, entering the blue and white room. The door shut behind him.
A concealed voxbox announced, “This is your mantra for this afternoon, Jake.”
He sat down in a comfortable blue chair.
The voxbox continued, “Say this one hundred times, Jake. ‘I am not responsible for the death of Beth Kittridge.’”
Jake nodded. “I am not responsible for the death of Beth Kittridge. I am not responsible for the death of Beth Kittridge. I am not responsible for …”
25
Sir Denis pointed a fat finger skyward. “Blimey, it’s them,” he cried, turning a paler shade of grey.
“Vámonos,” suggested Gomez, eyes on the dark blue skycar that was dropping down through the smog-heavy afternoon.
Pivoting, Gomez went running along the alley toward the rear entrance to the Hotel Chesterton.
“Bloody hell! They must know you made me shoot off my mouth.” The flabby man began a waddling run toward the safety of the hotel.
But he moved much too slowly to escape what the men in the rapidly descending skycar had in mind for him.
The beam of a lazgun came sizzling down. It found him easily, swiftly slicing him clean in half, from left to right, across the middle.
Sir Denis had been able to cry out a few words to express the brief, intense pain he felt. He used his own voice, all trace of British accent gone.
“Dios.” Gomez dived into the hotel as the remains of the fat man slapped and spilled all across the narrow alleyway.
The detective was in a small, dingy foyer. He spotted a down ramp and ran for it.
At the bottom of that he found the entryways to three forking corridors. He took the middle one, jogging into dim light and borders of deep shadow.
“Let’s see if we can,” he urged himself, “avoid getting dismantled.”
“Well, it’s the greaser.” Sitting slumped in an alcove, with a dented Brainbox resting on her narrow lap, was a skinny red-haired girl in her teens.
He recognized the emerald and crimson snakes tattooed on her thin bare arms. “Chiquita,” he said, stopping. “We met the other evening at the Hollywood Starwalk Park. What are you doing in this—”
“Hey, this is another one of my hangouts.”
He pointed his thumb in the direction from which he’d come. “You know another way out of this joint?”
“Right, always at one-thirty p.m. Prompt.”
Nodding, Gomez asked her, “Any notion where he resides or—Ouch.”
“Oops, sorry.”
“Where does Sir Denis live?”
“Near here.”
“Bueno,” he said. “How about a few more details—street address and the like?”
“Far as I know, he—” The music stopped, Mitzi froze again.
Gomez whipped out the Banx card and thrust it into the slot.
“What say we sit this one out?” she suggested. “My dogs are aching.” The pretty blonde android took his hand and led him over to one of the small rickety tables in a shadowy corner.
“About Sir Denis’ present location?”
“Well, the last time I danced with him—and if you really want to get your tootsies stomped on, try waltzing with a fat man,” she said, elbows on the tabletop. “Anyway, the last time I talked with the guy, he told me he had rooms down at the Chesterton Hotel.”
“Gracias.” Gomez started to stand up.
A heavy hand grabbed his shoulder from behind and shoved him back down. “What’s the rush, Sherlock?”
23
Slightly hunched, hands in his trouser pockets, Marriner stood at a wide viewindow in his suite in the Movie Palace Casino Hotel. The number of wrinkles on his black forehead kept increasing as he gazed down at the main street of the simulated city that existed within the orbiting satellite. “Get Swanson,” he said without turning from the window.
Miles/26, his chrome chest glittering in the artificial sunlight that was coming in through the multiple windows, was reclining on a low ebony sofa. Feet up, metallic hands locked behind his chrome-plated skull. “Can’t do, boss.”
“Don’t tell me he’s dead, too?”
“Nope, Swanson did a flit.”
“Where to?”
“He’s now working on the New Hollywood satellite.”
Marriner said, “See that Swanson has an accident.”
“How serious?”
“Your choice, Miles.”
“Righto, boss.”
“So who’s responsible for the palm trees down there on Marriner Drive?”
“A lady named Rosebud Semovich.”
“Tell her the fronds aren’t green enough.”
“You got it.”
Marriner left the window. “Where the hell is Rodriguez?”
“Ascending in Elevator number five.”
“He’s late.”
“By three minutes and seventeen seconds, yes.”
Marriner’s hands fisted. “Rodriguez better handle our Tuesday meet with Anzelmo and his toadies better than he manages his time.”
“I wouldn’t, boss, allude to Anzelmo’s associates as toadies.”
“What you call them is your own damn business, but don’t—”
“They are all, each in his own way, important Teklords. Cream of the European crop,” reminded the mechanical man. “And, more to the point, they’re your business partners on the TekNet venture.”
Marriner laughed a very quick laugh. “For now,” he told the robot.
The pretty blonde android pressed her fingertips to the slot between her breasts. “Gee, Leo, what are you doing to my date?”
The big, wide man who’d come up behind Gomez told her, “Go away now, Mitzi.”
“He’s a nice guy, Leo, and a paying customer to—”
“Leave us.”
“No need to speak to the lady in such a tone,” said Gomez in a voice he hoped sounded timid. He was being held in his chair by the pressure Leo was exerting on his shoulder.
“Well, I guess,” said the mechanical blonde, getting up from the wobbly little table, “I’ll leave you boys. Nice meeting you, mister.”
Leo leaned closer. “What you didn’t know, Gomez,” he said, “is that we got all our andy dancers bugged.”
“I am merely trying, sir, to locate my old school chum, Sir Denis Rowley, who—”
“We also got a great monitoring system,” continued the dance hall manager. “When I spotted you whirling about the floor with Mitzi, I exclaimed, ‘Why, I do believe that’s that son of a bitch from the goddamned Cosmos Detective Agency.’”
“That is one of my aliases, sí.”
“We don’t like private dicks hanging around here,” Leo explained, bending closer. “Nor are we fond of snoops who’re interested in Sir Denis.”
Gomez suddenly went slack and slumped in his chair.
That caused Leo to go lurching forward, loosening his grip.
Straightening up, Gomez brought up both booted feet and kicked the underside of the little table.
The table left the floor, went looping upward and then smacked into Leo’s head.
Gomez had, meantime, thrown himself to the floor. He rolled twice to his right, executed a reverse somersault that brought him to his feet with his stungun in his hand. “Adios, cabrón,” he said to the manager as he squeezed the trigger.
The beam smacked Leo in the groin. He yowled, half turned, crouched, fell to one knee and passed out.
By the time the big, wide man had smacked the dance floor, Gomez was halfway to the exit.
“See you again sometime, maybe?” called Mitzi when he went diving out into the afternoon street.
Gomez holstered his gun and kept running for a good two blocks.
Austin Quadrill allowed himself to smile.
“Much better,” he murmured, crouching to pick the silver kitten up from his workshop floor.
The little clockwork animal began purring as he lifted it up close to his face. With one glittering metallic paw it poked at his chin as he inspected it.
“Jesus, that’s damn touching,” observed a disdainful voice behind him.
He spun around, set the clockwork kitten on a worktable. “Why are you here, Yedra?”
The crew-cut young woman laughed. “Aren’t you more interested in the how of it, Austin?”
“I assume somebody betrayed me. Gave you my location,” he said, scowling at her. “It won’t be difficult to find out who.”
“And I had to get by your security system too.” Yedra laughed again, moving nearer to him. “I told you I’d find you, asshole, and I did it.”
“Yes, you can’t seem to resist a challenge like that,” he commented. “A pity.”
She started to reach out to pat the clockwork kitten. “That’s damned cute. You ought—”
“I don’t want you here.” Quadrill caught her wrist before her fingertips reached the kitten. “I don’t want anybody here.”
She pulled free of him, backed off. “C’mon, pendejo, admit that you’re impressed by me,” she coaxed. “You also, maybe, ought to be a little bit scared, Austin. If you were to screw up on a job for me—hell, I’d come and find you no matter where you were holed up.”
Head slightly tilted to the left, he eyed her. “Where’s the meeting between Marriner and Anzelmo’s crew going to take place? That is what you came to tell me, isn’t it?”
Smiling, she nodded and ran the flat of her hand over her close-cropped dark hair. “You still want to work for me? You’re not offended that I invaded your privacy?”
“I’m working for Johnny Trocadero and you,” he corrected. “Soon as you put another third of my fee into my undercover account, I’ll get rolling.”
“It’s there already,” she assured him. “The place is so obvious, we should’ve guessed it.” She made an upward jabbing motion with her right thumb. “Up in the Movie Palace.”
“And it’s still Tuesday?”
“Tuesday, just after dinner—satellite time.”
“All right.” He turned his back on her, tapped the kitten’s shiny back with his forefinger. “I’ll take care of it.”
“You sure you can? There’s a hell of a lot of security to get through.”
Facing her, Quadrill said, “I’ll do it.”
“Keep in mind, Austin, that I got in here. Maybe you’re slipping and we need—”
“I was too complacent about my security,” he told her. “Your break-in was just the stimulus I needed.”
She ran her hand over her hair again. “Okay,” she said, slowly. “If anything changes, you’ll hear from me.”
“Not in person,” he said.
Yedra smiled at him. “I won’t scare you again,” she said.
He took her arm and guided her toward the doorway. “You’ve got one of those foolish skull-mail implants, don’t you?”
“Yes—and it isn’t foolish.”
Reaching out, he tapped the door and it slid aside. “Causes you a lot of headaches, doesn’t it?”
“No, nothing like that.” Yedra stepped out into the hallway. “I never feel any pain from it at all.”
The door shut on her and Quadrill returned to his worktable. “You will,” he promised quietly.
24
Gomez encountered him in an alley.
This particular alley, narrow and unkempt, ran along the backside of the three-story Hotel Chesterton.
The detective was approaching the rear entrance to the tumbledown neostucco building.
Sir Denis Rowley was a flabby man of middle years. His shaggy hair was a carroty orange, his puffy face of a greyish hue. Everything he owned at the moment, he was carrying in one modest-sized suitcase.
He came hurrying, puffing, out of the rear doorway of the Chesterton about ten seconds before Gomez reached it.
“Momentito, Sir Denis,” Gomez called.
The fat man was waddling off in the opposite direction. “In a frightful hurry, old man,” he said over his shoulder.
Sprinting, Gomez caught up with him, grabbed one flabby arm and halted his retreat. “I want to have a small little talk with you.”
“Afraid I don’t know you, old boy,” he said, trying to break away. “No time to chitchat with anyone actually.”
“You know me, Denny.” Gomez yanked him around so that they were facing each other. “I knew you even before your knighthood.”
Sir Denis’ eyes narrowed. “Jove, I do believe it’s Sidney Gomez,” he said. “Forgive me, Sidney, old fellow, but I’ve a most urgent appointment elsewhere.”
“No, actually you’re going to tell me where they took Jake.”
Sir Denis inquired, “Which Jake would this be?”
From his shoulder holster Gomez yanked his stungun. He jabbed it into the flabby man’s middle. “Explain to me who hired you to arrange their entry into the NecroPlex,” he suggested, “or you’ll suffer from numb cojones for the foreseeable future.”
“Sidney, you know my code of ethics won’t—”
“Who paid you?” he said. “And where is Jake Cardigan?”
The flabby man was perspiring. “English chaps, they were,” he said finally.
Gomez prodded with the gun barrel. “And?”
“These are powerful people, Sidney. Mean-minded too, and they aren’t awfully fond of a snitch.”
“Who?”
Sir Denis swallowed twice, glancing around the alley, uneasy. “They work for the Anzelmo cartel. The only name I know is that of the head chap—Edmond Yates.”
“Why did they go into that underground setup?”
“To fetch your wife—that is, your onetime wife,” the fat man told him.
“What were they supposed to do with her?”
“Don’t know, Sidney.” He shook his head vigorously.
“And what were their orders concerning Jake and me?”
Sir Denis glanced around again. “Beastly hot in this alley, don’t you think?”
“What were their orders?”
“This they didn’t confide in me,” he said. “However, old man, I heard—and this is only hearsay, mind you—they grabbed your partner down there. Took him to Doc Sears.”
Pulling back his gun hand, Gomez stepped backwards. “That old quack over in the Venice Sector?”
“Fancies himself a therapist,” answered the flabby man. “Specializes in mindwipes, brainscans and other shady practices. Used to be a Tek runner, I do believe.”
“Okay, Sir Denis,” said Gomez, starting to put his stungun away. “You can trot along and—”
“Bloody hell.” The fat man was looking up into the hot, hazy sky overhead. “It’s too damned late.”
“… Wise decision, Jake, to have yourself committed here. Don’t you?”
Jake suddenly became aware of himself again.
“Is something wrong, Jake?”
He was sitting in a comfortable chair on a sun-bright patio. Beyond the oval of simulated red brick stretched a broad slanting lawn. Then came woods, tall trees and deep shadows.
Far off, down near the edge of the forest, there were people. Five or six of them, small in the distance, blurred. Walking some of them, one sitting slumped in an electronic wheelchair.
“Jake?”
The woman was sitting a few feet away from him, in a less comfortable chair. She was thin, pale blonde, wearing a buff-colored skirtsuit. Jake had never seen her before.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Weatherford, I didn’t quite catch your question,” he said to her.
She smiled. “Nothing to be sorry about.” She was sitting very straight in the metal chair, hands folded in her lap. “I was simply complimenting you on your decision to come to The Institute—voluntarily—and begin to work on your problem.”
Far downhill one of the tiny figures left the group and went running toward the forest. He suddenly hit some invisible barrier, seemed to hang in the air for a few seconds before dropping to his knees on the bright green grass.
Jake nodded. “Yes, I realized, doctor, that it was time to do something. My obsession with the death of Beth Kittridge was interfering with my work.”
“With your entire life,” added the doctor.
“Exactly, yeah. And, I feel, in the time I’ve been here at The Institute I’ve started to make progress.” Jake couldn’t seem to remember exactly how long he’d actually been here. He wasn’t, he now realized, sure where here was.
Dr. Weatherford leaned forward, resting her hands on her knees. “I know you have very strong feelings about Tek,” she said. “Strongly negative attitudes.”
“Getting hooked on Tek screwed up my life.”
She nodded with sympathy. “I can understand that, Jake,” she said. “However, I think a technique we’ve developed here at The Institute might very well help you to distance yourself from Beth’s death.”
He frowned. “This new technique—it involves Tek?”
“It does,” replied the thin doctor. “You have my word, however, that we only use it in a well-controlled and completely safe manner.”
“I don’t,” he said, “know.”
“Dr. Allensky has had a great deal of success recently with Tek therapy.”
Jake couldn’t remember who Dr. Allensky was. “Well, if he says it works, I suppose it’s okay.”
“That’s the sort of positive attitude I’m pleased to see you adopting, Jake.”
“I came here to work on my problem,” he told the therapist. “I’ll go along with whatever you and Dr. Allensky suggest.”
Smiling, she rose from her chair. “That ends our session for this afternoon,” she informed him. “If we can arrange it, I’d very much like to have your first Tek therapy session this evening after the shift one dinner hour.”
“That would be fine.” He eased up out of his chair and turned away from the doctor.
This wing of The Institute was constructed chiefly of opaque plastiglass panels and silvery metal struts.
He said goodbye to Dr. Weatherford and went walking toward a door marked Patients’ Entrance 6.
Jake felt that he shouldn’t have any notion where his room was. But he did seem to know.
He crossed over to Ramp 3, let it carry him up to Level 5. His room was #5R, and as soon as it scanned his hand print, it let him in.
He crossed the threshold, entering the blue and white room. The door shut behind him.
A concealed voxbox announced, “This is your mantra for this afternoon, Jake.”
He sat down in a comfortable blue chair.
The voxbox continued, “Say this one hundred times, Jake. ‘I am not responsible for the death of Beth Kittridge.’”
Jake nodded. “I am not responsible for the death of Beth Kittridge. I am not responsible for the death of Beth Kittridge. I am not responsible for …”
25
Sir Denis pointed a fat finger skyward. “Blimey, it’s them,” he cried, turning a paler shade of grey.
“Vámonos,” suggested Gomez, eyes on the dark blue skycar that was dropping down through the smog-heavy afternoon.
Pivoting, Gomez went running along the alley toward the rear entrance to the Hotel Chesterton.
“Bloody hell! They must know you made me shoot off my mouth.” The flabby man began a waddling run toward the safety of the hotel.
But he moved much too slowly to escape what the men in the rapidly descending skycar had in mind for him.
The beam of a lazgun came sizzling down. It found him easily, swiftly slicing him clean in half, from left to right, across the middle.
Sir Denis had been able to cry out a few words to express the brief, intense pain he felt. He used his own voice, all trace of British accent gone.
“Dios.” Gomez dived into the hotel as the remains of the fat man slapped and spilled all across the narrow alleyway.
The detective was in a small, dingy foyer. He spotted a down ramp and ran for it.
At the bottom of that he found the entryways to three forking corridors. He took the middle one, jogging into dim light and borders of deep shadow.
“Let’s see if we can,” he urged himself, “avoid getting dismantled.”
“Well, it’s the greaser.” Sitting slumped in an alcove, with a dented Brainbox resting on her narrow lap, was a skinny red-haired girl in her teens.
He recognized the emerald and crimson snakes tattooed on her thin bare arms. “Chiquita,” he said, stopping. “We met the other evening at the Hollywood Starwalk Park. What are you doing in this—”
“Hey, this is another one of my hangouts.”
He pointed his thumb in the direction from which he’d come. “You know another way out of this joint?”
